Tag: Foundation for Excellence in Education

Diane Ravitch just wrote about Georgia’s Governor Nathan Deal’s veto of opt-out legislation that passed the Georgia General Assembly. This immediately reminded me of Delaware Governor Jack Markell’s horrible veto of House Bill 50 in the summer of 2015. Say, State Rep. Earl Jaques, why the hell hasn’t the new opt out legislation, House Bill 60, been put on the agenda for the House Education Committee. You promised me it would be over two months ago. Guess it isn’t a priority for YOU so it won’t get on there. Being the Chair of the Delaware House Education Committee means allowing all education bills to be heard in committee.

Opt out is alive and well. I may not write about it as much, but it is still happening. New York continues to have terrific opt out numbers. It won’t be until July or so until we find out Delaware’s opt out numbers for this year. That is when the Delaware Dept. of Education releases all the Smarter Balanced information from this year.

Down in Georgia, Jeb Bush’s insane Foundation for Excellence in Education jumped on the veto bandwagon. Ravitch quoted the Atlanta Journal-Constituion:

“The proposal would have harmed students and teachers by denying access to measurements that track progress on standardized assessments,” the advocacy group, founded by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, said in a statement. “Maintaining a transparent and accountable measurement systems is critical to ensuring students are on track to succeed in college and beyond — and indicates how successful schools are in preparing students for the future.”

Hey Jeb, we don’t want progress on standardized assessments, we just want regular student progress. These flawed and meaningless tests don’t provide that. They feed the data whore beasts and waste a crapload of time in our schools. They stress kids out and the tests are used to label and shame teachers and schools. Enough already!

Ron Russo, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Caesar Rodney Institute, wrote a blog post yesterday with a BOLD PLAN for Delaware schools. By even mentioning former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the Foundation for Excellence in Education in the very first sentence, it was hard to lend any credibility to this piece. But I read the whole thing out of morbid curiosity.

…Governor Jeb Bush, the keynote speaker, told the attendees that they had to, “Be big, be bold, or go home.”

I would have left at that point and proudly went home. Jeb Bush has made a ton of money capitalizing off the backs of schools and students. He is the very essence of corporate education reform. I give anything he says zero weight.

Russo seems to view former Red Clay Consolidated Board President William Manning as the Messiah of Delaware education:

He recommended a confederation of independent schools each locally managed and free of regulations about who to hire and how to teach. The schools would be evaluated only by performance data that would be shared with the public.

Manning’s vision created charter schools that do not serve the populations within their district boundaries. Quite a few Delaware charters have selective enrollment preferences that seem to further segregation and push out kids with high needs. Manning was the lead attorney in the lawsuit against the Christina School District when charters that serve Christina students sued the district to get more money per student. Eventually the lawsuit wound up becoming a settlement that further stripped funds away from the district. Russo’s BOLD PLAN is modeled after the original charter school bill, Senate Bill 200:

The Caesar Rodney Institute is supporting a systemic change to our education bureaucracy called the “BOLD PLAN”. It significantly alters the way the current education system operates by empowering the individual schools to make operational decisions to best serve their students.

In theory, this would be a great idea. However, Russo lost me yet again when he brought up the VERY controversial priority schools as a potential model for this plan:

CRI’s BOLD PLAN incorporates the best features of the 1995 Charter School Law and the Memorandum of Understanding designed by Delaware’s DOE for Priority Schools. If the changes proposed in the MOU were expected to raise the performance of the state’s lowest performing schools, why wouldn’t those changes be offered to all public schools?

Sorry Ron, but the priority school Memorandums of Understanding were absolutely horrible and did more to create parent backlash in Wilmington than anything seen before. So what would this plan consist of? Therein lies the rub:

BOLD legislation would specify areas of local decision-making. Such areas would include: 1) Authority to hire and dismiss all staff; 2) All programing inputs (school calendar, schedule, curriculum aligned to Delaware standards, instructional practices and methodology, textbooks, technology, etc.); 3) Marketing and planning; 4) Support services including transportation, food, and maintenance; 5) Budget preparation and expenditure control with surplus operating funds retained by the school. Schools will have autonomy from any district or Delaware DOE requirements not mandated by state or federal law.

This legislation has more holes than a donut shop.

What happens if the board membership or the Superintendent of the district is not operating under normal parameters of their function? What if personal grudges get in the way of a sound decision to hire or dismiss all staff? Delaware is a small state and conflicts of interest are well-known in this state.

You lost me at “Delaware standards”. If you truly want to give local education authorities the coveted local control, they would be free to set their own curriculum without being tied to any type of standard pushed down from the state or federal government. I have yet to see any indication Delaware will get rid of Common Core which was created under false pretenses.

Don’t they already do this anyway?

See #3

That would not be a good thing. Delaware charter schools already keep their surplus transportation funds in a sweetheart deal with the General Assembly and there is no apparatus to make sure those funds are being used with fidelity. What is the point of even having a district or charter board if the school can do whatever it wants with extra money? This proposal sounds like anarchy.

Russo’s logic becomes even more confusing when he casually drops the Rodel Visionfests and Race To The Top into his conversation:

The BOLD PLAN complements Delaware’s other education improvement efforts (Visions, Races, etc.). In fact, it may even complete them.

I don’t think completion of those plans is something anyone in Delaware really wants. Race To The Top was an unmitigated disaster with funds going to the state Department of Education more than local school districts. The Vision Coalition goals further perpetuate many bad corporate education reform policies. It is hard to take anything they do seriously when the CEO of the Rodel Foundation of Delaware, Dr. Herdman, makes over $345,000 a year.

Ironically, Russo channels Dan Rich who has been very involved with the Wilmington Education Improvement Commission’s proposed Wilmington redistricting. But Russo doesn’t bring him up in any way related to that endeavor but rather his involvement with the Vision Coalition:

At the very first Vision 2015 meeting hosted by Dan Rich, then Provost of the University of Delaware, he ended the meeting by telling the attendees that if they wanted to improve Delaware’s public schools they had to be bold and, if they didn’t want to be bold, they should get out. Hmmmm, it seems that Dan was way ahead of Jeb.

Comparing Rich to Jeb Bush almost seems insulting. Of course, any education push should be bold. But by telling people if you don’t like it to “get out” or “go home” it is essentially saying if you don’t agree with us we won’t give you the time of day. That is NOT the way education issues should be ironed out and only creates more of a divide. The Delaware charter school experiment, now well into it’s third decade, has met with very mixed results. It has not been the rousing success the forefathers of the original legislation thought it would be. Why would Delaware even entertain this idea based on that? And lest we forget, all this imaginary “success” is based on standardized test scores, of which Delaware has gone through three different state assessments since then. Sorry Ron, but this is not a BOLD PLAN. It is an old plan, that just plain doesn’t work.

I have to wonder about the timing of this article. The Caesar Rodney Institute has long been a fierce supporter of school vouchers. Delaware has been very resistant to that system under Democrat control but under the Trump administration and the appointment of Betsy DeVos as the U.S. Secretary of Education, it is not surprising to see Russo coming out with this type of article. President Trump and DeVos want a federal school voucher system that has already met with disappointing results in several states.

It’s real easy to play Monday morning quarterback after your team just took a huge hit. Donald Trump promised (and fooled) many citizens into thinking he could get rid of Common Core. So much so that his pick for Secretary of Education is now backtracking on her years of actions financially supporting Common Core. She sits on Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education. This foundation LOVES Common Core and all that comes with it. DeVos, through the Betsy and Steve DeVos Foundation, poured millions of dollars into pro-Common Core candidates.

On some Betsy DeVos Question and Answer website that sprung out of nowhere, she denounces Common Core. This website was created on 8/16/16, but her picture was just added this month. This isn’t some long-time website that shows the DeVos denunciation of Common Core. This website was created specifically for the possibility of a Trump win. Why would anyone put up a q and a website unless they knew what the opposition would immediately come out with? This is what she has to say about Common Core. Items in red are my response to that.

Q: There’s been a lot of talk about Common Core. Can you provide some straight talk on this topic?

Certainly. I am not a supporter—period.

Financial support into candidates and states that support it IS supporting it.

I do support high standards, strong accountability, and local control. When Governors such as John Engler, Mike Huckabee, and Mike Pence were driving the conversation on voluntary high standards driven by local voices, it all made sense.

State standards, as written in the Every Student Succeeds Act, are now state decisions. Trump couldn’t dump them if he tried. There is a big difference between state and local decisions. The states now call the shots on education. The locals are just along for the ride. Local control of education is a thing of the past.

Have organizations that I have been a part of supported Common Core? Of course. But that’s not my position. Sometimes it’s not just students who need to do their homework.

I don’t even know what that means Betsy DeVos. Common Core wasn’t created because kids weren’t doing their homework. It was set up for a VERY specific reason which I will get to soon.

However, along the way, it got turned into a federalized boondoggle.

A very intentional federalized boondoggle where states gave up ALL control to the feds. Once the states adopted the standards, it didn’t end there. In came the standardized testing, the accountability game that judges failing schools based on those same tests, as well as the longitudinal data (which was the real purpose which I will also get to later) creation in every state to allow student data to go out. Once everything was set up in the states through Federal funds (most of which did not go to local schools but to state Departments of Education who paid education reform companies billions of dollars), then the reauthorization of ESEA came about. ESSA is the shift towards this future. Giving the illusion of state control based on federal mandates and snake-oil deals from the Obama administration.

Above all, I believe every child, no matter their zip code or their parents’ jobs, deserves access to a quality education.

Every single corporate education reformer says this, but being pro-school choice has not equated to greater educational improvement for children overall. Especially children that are minorities, low-income, English Language learners, and students with disabilities.

Betsy DeVos, through her foundation work for her own foundation as well as others, has been on of the biggest driving forces for the privatization of American public education. But why? Where is all of this going?

As I put up my post about DeVos selection for the U.S. Secretary of Education, I was met with an onslaught of comments stating she doesn’t support Common Core. Actions speak louder than words. I immediately directed readers to this excellent post showing how she DOES support Common Core and how. And then I wrote this:

To put this in a very easy way to understand, Common Core was created to train young minds for constant all-the-time digital learning. State assessments (based on Common Core) will become stealth assessments embedded in personalized learning/competency-based education environments. Once they bust the unions, traditional school districts will fall. Charters will go online. Our young kids will go to local non-profits to learn online while older kids learn online in a pay to earn environment through Charter Online Inc. Meanwhile, all this data from ed tech is tracking every student and whoring out their personal data and gearing them towards pre-determined professions that corporations want, not the kids. Who do you think will profit from this? Charters. Teachers will become glorified moderators while parents watch their rights slowly disappear. Their kids will go to community health-based centers for everything. This is the grand agenda. There is nothing Trump can do to stop it. Complete control over the future by corporations. Read into plans for Blockchain technology to see where all of this is going…. This has NEVER been about kids. It has always been about corporate profit.

We are now at a huge tipping point with public education. I’ve actually seen parents today, on anti-Common Core Facebook pages, actually trying to convince me DeVos is a good pick and to give her a chance. This is what the corporate education reformers do best. They pit people against each other. While everyone is arguing about this and that, they are getting things done. Planting seeds to get the whole thing done. They are the masters of distraction. Bill Gates is just one of them. Today, we saw another billionaire get the top education job in the country. With no background of ever being an educator. Do you really think it is a coincidence that the past three Secretaries of Education have been fervent supporters of school choice, charter schools, and “higher standards”? You can call Common Core whatever you want. But it is the same everywhere, in every state. It is just a vessel to much bigger plans, a complete and utter transformation of society where the top will always be on the top, but true choice and upward mobility for the rest will be on the bottom. It is central to destroying who we are as a nation. A nation of freedom and free will. That will be stripped from us, forever. We will become the cradle to grave workforce with the rich and elite overlords looking down upon us. The future generations of today’s rich and elite who use their money and influence to reshape society to their mold.

This was going to happen no matter who won the Presidency. Clinton, Trump, Johnson, Stein… it didn’t matter. Who do you really think is running the show? Politicians? No. It is corporations. Follow the money. Read the stuff that is coming out right now through ESSA. Sift through the smoke and open your eyes America. And act. Do something. They have you fooled. Everyone is going nuts about Trump, both sides. Love or hate. Meanwhile, no one is talking about the WOIA bills in every state. Or the ed tech invasion happening in your schools. Or the shift towards getting rid of number grades towards the same type of scores on standardized tests. How many states are developing “Pathways” programs which shift education towards a pre-determined career rather than moving on to college? Trump doesn’t matter. Not in the long run. Neither did Clinton. This was going to happen before your very eyes.

Do you hear anyone, aside from student privacy groups, demanding Trump restore FERPA to pre-2008 and 2011 levels? No. Do you hear anyone making a big deal about the Bill Gates driven work group that is deciding data sharing at ALL levels? No. Do you know why? Because they are distracting you. And they are succeeding.

Someone wrote to me on Facebook today that to change things would require a rebellion. That person wasn’t promoting it. I am. It is what we need. And it has to happen now. Please share this article. Spread it. Make sure people see it and see the truth about what is happening. The reformers will say I am a conspiracy theorist. I will gladly take that. Because this is a vast conspiracy that has been playing out for decades. And they aren’t done yet. Time for a rebellion.

On Tuesday, the Education and Workforce Committee held a Congressional hearing called “Strengthening Education Research and Privacy Protections to Better Serve Students”. With one parent advocate, one data guy from the Georgia Department of Education, and two corporate schills (yes, there were two, more on that one later). The hearing was stacked with U.S. Representatives who are, shall we say, sympathetic to the data-testing regime. We all know the type!

If you looked at the witness list for who was giving testimony at this hearing on the EdWorkforce website, you can see who they were:

So who are these people? Rachael Strickland is the co-founder and co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. Neil Campbell is the Policy Director for Next Generation Reforms at the Foundation for Excellence in Education (Jeb Bush’s company). Jane Hannaway is with the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. Robert Swiggum is the Deputy Superintendent for the Georgia Department of Education. But one of these four has another job, which the Education and Workforce Committee did not include on their website. During the hearing, this person’s other job wasn’t even discussed at all. But it is a whopper. So which one was it?

The day before the hearing, I received an email from the EdWorkforce Committee notifying me of the hearing. They had the exact same witnesses in the email, but one of them has a different job:

Take a good look at Dr. Jane Hannaway… Institute Fellow, American Institutes for Research. Also known as AIR, this is the company that was instrumental in creating the Smarter Balanced Assessment. They are my state’s vendor for Smarter Balanced. They are all over the place. Now why would the United States Education and Workforce Committee not mention that glaring fact at all? Why would they not include it on their website and have the witness, sworn to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, not mention this at all? In fact non-Government employees are required to fill out a “Truth In Testimony” form prior to any Congressional hearing. Ms. Strickland and Mr. Campbell both listed their affiliated sources, but Ms. Hannaway didn’t list any organizations. Even though she wrote about her affiliation with AIR in her testimony, it wasn’t spoken out loud.

There are some key points I want to highlight from Hannaway’s testimony, with my thoughts in red:

Almost every state has developed an individual student level longitudinal administrative data system. These data systems have substantive and technical research advantages, as well as efficiency virtues.

Substantive, technical, and efficiency virtues: Can we say cha-ching? Show me the money?

Because the data are existing working files – created, maintained and used by the state for administrative purposes – they are readily available for approved research purposes.

I have no doubt the states are making these “readily available”. And I’m sure they pay a pretty penny to make it so!

Having data already in hand means the turnaround time for getting feedback on the results of new policies is short, allowing informed decision making about whether to discontinue, modify or continue particular policies and practices. Indeed, some decisions of interest can be made almost in real time.

Decision making, policies, practices: This lady is combing through your child’s data. She doesn’t at a government agency, but I’m sure she does work for government agencies. How are these corporations setting policy? Very frightening…

The files include data on all students and all teachers in the state over a number of years. So data on students of interest for a particular intervention or for a particular study, say 8th graders, or high performing students, or disadvantaged students can be easily selected.

“A particular intervention”… sounds like something every parent should worry about. Note the word “all”: all teachers, all students. They have it set up so they can “shop” through the data for any possible category they want. I didn’t underline this for emphasis. It was underlined in her testimony.

Indeed, because teachers can be linked in the data to their students and students’ test scores, teachers can also be compared in terms of their performance. Indeed, some of the most important finding from studies using longitudinal data have focused on teacher effectiveness.

Because that data has given us so many unreasonable conclusions, I find that data inconclusive. And yet, here is Hannaway continuing to use the biggest fallacy of our time…

For example, regression discontinuity designs can assess the effect of, say, receiving an award on subsequent behavior by comparing results for students just above and below the performance award threshold.

In other words, they set the “performance award threshold”, aka, the high-stakes standardized test scores, based on a point where there would always be some above or below the threshold. We will NEVER have maximum proficiency.

The advantages in terms of policy insights of individual education data are also substantially expanded when linked to later individual measures in areas beyond education, such as labor market (employment and earnings), justice and health outcomes.

Basically, she is saying we are going to use this data to track and catalog every individual student and determine your outcome for you based on high-stakes standardized testing data.

The state anonymizes the data before researchers receive them. Each student is assigned a state-constructed unique student id (USI) that is used by researchers to link data for each student across years and schools.

So instead of giving a name and social security number, I’ll call this the number of the beast scenario. For “each student”… has anyone read “Revelations” recently?

Hannaway said, when asked about opt out and what it does to the data: “The data we’re receiving would look like Swiss cheese.” She couldn’t have said it any better! If you never had a reason to opt your child out before, know that your child’s “unique” number of the beast, assigned by your state, is given to all education agencies who ask for it from your state. They base conclusions and policy and decisions, which become laws, based on that crappy test your child takes once a year. Do your child a favor: make some Swiss cheese for companies like American Institutes for Research. It is the ONLY way this nonsense will ever stop! We need MORE Swiss Cheese!

To watch the full video, watch below. The hearing doesn’t begin until the 6:37 mark.

Campbell looks really nervous at several points during this hearing. He keeps wringing his hands. Is that because he is afraid of what will come out or guilt? Or is he generally a nervous guy?

I love how Swiggum says that states own the data. Really? Does the Delaware DOE “own” the data on my child? His academic performance, social-emotional behavior, all that… they “own” it? I don’t think so. If they own it, they should take better care of it!